ABSTRACT
While the researchers discussed above looked at what the professors were doing, another group looked at how students learn. Adult intellectual development had received very little attention in comparison to child development. Received wisdom held that the learning component of the personality was fully formed by early adolescence, establishing how the individual adapted to all tasks throughout his or her life. The earliest effort to distinguish between children’s lower-level learning and the higher-level learning of adults was the taxonomy of cognitive skills developed by Bloom (Bloom, et al. 1956). The taxonomy begins with knowledge acquisition, such as remembering definitions or formulas. The next skill involves comprehension, demonstrating an understanding of the meaning of remembered information by giving an example or by describing a common context. The next skill focuses on application, using knowledge in a new context or applying it to solve a novel problem. The fourth skill is analysis. This involves a varied set of applications, such as breaking knowledge up into its constituent parts and explaining their interrelationships, understanding the boundary conditions of a category, or distinguishing between the relevant and the extraneous in the relationships between elements. The fifth skill is synthesis, which consists of putting the analyzed parts together to form a new and different whole. Synthesis is involved in any reasoning where the results reflect originality and creativity. Bloom’s sixth step is evaluation, the fashioning of criteria to arrive at a judgment of value about knowledge. Bloom hypothesized that as children develop into adults they acquire these meta-skills in this order.
